Tag: Career

“If you put too much emphasis on those [automated test] scripts, you won’t notice misaligned text, hostile user interfaces, bad color choices, and inconsistency. Worse, you’ll have a culture of testers frantically working to get their own code working, which crowds out what you need them to do: evaluate someone else’s code.”

I used to think that you could/should teach testers to write code (as it will make them better testers), but I’m now at a point where I think that it’s a bad idea to teach testers to code for a number of reasons:

A software tester’s primary responsibility/focus should always be to test software. By including a responsibility to also write code/software takes away from that primary focus. Testers will get into a trap of sorting out their own coding issues over doing their actual job.

If a software tester wants their primary focus to be writing code, they should become a software programmer. A lot of testers want to learn coding not because they’ll be a better tester, but they want to earn more money. These testers should aim to be become programmers/developers if they want to code or think they can earn more money doing that.

Developing automated tests should be done as part of developing the new/changed functionality (not separately). This has numerous benefits such as choosing the best level to test at (unit, integration etc.) at the right time. This means there isn’t a separate team lagging behind the development team for test coverage.

Testers are great at providing input into automated test coverage but shouldn’t be responsible for creating that coverage. A tester working with a developer to create tests is a good way to get this done.

I think the software development industry would be a lot better if we had expectations on programmers to be responsible for self-tested code using automated tests, and testers to be responsible for testing the software and testing the the automated tests. Any tester wanting to code will move towards a programming job that allows them to do that and not try to change what is expected of them in their role.

Update 19th Jan 2015: this post seems to have triggered a lot of emotion, let me clarify some things:

A tester having technical skills isn’t bad: the more technical skills the tester has the better – if they can interrogate a database or run a sql trace then they’ll be more efficient/effective at their job – and a tester can be technical without knowing how to code

I don’t consider moving from testing into programming by any means the only form of career advancement: some testers hate coding and that’s fine, other’s love coding and I think it would be beneficial for them to become a programmer if they want to code more than they test.

I still believe everyone should take responsibility for their own career rather than expecting their employer/boss/industry leader/blogger to do it for them (more about this here).